MANY recent Memories have told of Darlington’s golden age of cinema, but Tom Sellars writes from Guisborough to tell us how Form 2B at Polam Hall School, in Darlington, once made their own film.
Tom was a projectionist at many of the town’s cinemas during that golden age before the Second World War, when he was posted to the Army Kinema Service.
After the war, he became a school laboratory technician, and when the Polam pupils discovered his cinema background in 1979, they decided to make their own 15-minute film.
Filming in Polam Hall's grounds for The Wicked Baron
Written and directed by Tom, it was called The Wicked Baron, and it told of an innocent young girl who found that she had been gambled away by her drunken father in a card game. The girls made all the sets and the costumes, including the moustaches for the male characters to wear, and did all the filming.
However, production was beset by difficulties. First of all, chickenpox accounted for the heroine, Amy Howes. Then a flu bug wiped out most of the cast. When everyone was about recovered, the villain, Victoria Gray, went down with tonsillitis, which meant a stand-in, Sian Allan, had to put on her moustache to complete the final scenes.
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